The main intuition this sparks in me is that it gives us concrete data structures to look for when talking broadly about the brain doing ‘compression’ by rotating a high dimensional object and carving off recognized chunks (simple distributions) in order to make the messy inputs more modular, composable, accessible, error correctable, etc. Sort of the way that predictive coding gives us a target to hunt for in looking for structures that look like they might be doing something like the atomic predictive coding unit.
The main intuition this sparks in me is that it gives us concrete data structures to look for when talking broadly about the brain doing ‘compression’ by rotating a high dimensional object and carving off recognized chunks (simple distributions) in order to make the messy inputs more modular, composable, accessible, error correctable, etc. Sort of the way that predictive coding gives us a target to hunt for in looking for structures that look like they might be doing something like the atomic predictive coding unit.